The long-awaited and somewhat overdue version 5 of Events Manager is officially here! The major change in the plugin is that Events and Locations are now custom post types, which now multiplies the possibilities available to users and developers alike when making events work your way.

Upgrade Instructions

A little back story and quick recap of what led up to this moment….

Events Manager was originally made available back in the early days of WordPress (in the first releases of WordPress 2) when custom posts simply didn’t exist and the flexibility of posts themselves were not suited to making events. Davide (quite rightly) opted for hosting event information outside the posts table which added (and still does) extra benefits and more possibilities to extend the plugin.

Over the years, WordPress has worked towards making custom post types, which allow you to leverage the power of WordPress posts and pages but use them in the context of your objects (e.g. Movies, Actors, Places, etc.). We’ve kept a close eye on this, and finally decided to make the jump in early-Summer 2011.

A large portion of time was dedicated to studying how to make a smooth transition with as few trade-offs as possible, as well as keeping some of the great features that makes Events Manager such a unique events plugin. Over various months of researching, tinkering and experimenting, and with the help of an eager and helpful community with beta testing, we now have a better plugin than ever before!

Summary of Changes

There are so many changes that it’s almost impossible to list them all here. However, here’s a list with the major improvements and features to EM 5:

• Events and Locations are now custom post types
• Categories are now custom taxonomies
• Events can have tags
• New placeholders, conditionals and search attributes
• BuddyPress module rewritten using the latest 1.5 BP_Component API
• More flexibility with choosing EM pages (e.g. seperate location, event and category list pages)
• Extended page formatting options
• New time picker and improved datepicker
• Streamlined templates and consolidated varoius list templates
• Event and location editors revamped, consolidated and basic CSS added for front-end forms
• Locations are now optional (if chosen)
• More user capabilities added for finer permission control
• Events can be all-day events
• Various bugs fixed

The update should be available via the automatic updater in your WordPress sites.

What’s Next …. 5.1!

No time to rest just yet! With all the new possibilities and updates we have in store, we already have our eyes set on version 5.1! Alongside some important future-proofing and general spring-cleaning, we’re preparing the plugin for an onslaught of new features, which means:

• More documentation (especially for developers)
• Cleaning up the bookings interface and forms
• Harmonize plugin texts and translation files
• Review all templates in attempt to prevent future changes and ensure compatibility with user template customization
• Organize our huge to-do list of features and requests (and do a few whilst we’re at it ;))

And without further ado, I wish you a Happy New Year! 2012 is going to be a very interesting year for Events Manager, we look forward to the journey and seeing you along the way.